Milton's 400th

A group of St. Olaf faculty and students staged a marathon reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost last month to honor the poet's 400th birthday. Here's a nice feature on the event:



If you're wondering why you should care about Milton's birthday, you can read a lecture by St. Olaf Professor of English Edward DuRocher on "Why Milton Matters."

A-Bomb Babies

Robert Krulwich's segments on NPR--Krulwich on Science--always help explain the science world around us in a delightful way.

This past Sunday, Krulwich explained "How A-Bomb Testing Changed Our Trees" and changed some of us, too. The atmospheric a-bomb tests of the 1950s and '60s blew lots of neutrons in the air, some of which combined with carbon-12 to create carbon-14 atoms. The boost in carbon-14 atoms was absorbed into every tree in the world that was alive during that time, creating a spike in carbon-14 that's an indelible marker within the tree.

And that which is true for the trees is true for us, too. People ate the fruit of trees--apples, pecans, pears, oranges, etc.--and gained an internal knowledge of carbon-14 which was passed along to the children of the era (giving post-lapsarian a whole new implication). As a result, people born during the atmospheric tests have a carbon-14 spike in their DNA. As Krulwich says, we can date people with carbon-14 testing. 

You can listen to the story at NPR's webpage (4:24 min.).

Thanksgiving, 1895

As The New York Times continues to digitize its archive, the newspaper occasionally calls our attention to a noteworthy or particularly apt article from the past. So it is with this 1895 New York Times article about Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving and Eating (PDF).

The lead article is about the history of the holiday. We find the second article even more interesting: it explains how sufficient turkeys were shipped across the country over 100 years ago . . . more or less successfully!

It IS a Small World, After All

The 2008 Small World Winners are now posted on Nikon's website, where you can view a slide show of all the winners. Pictured above, Michael Stringer's  Pleurosigma (marine diatoms) photographed at 200x.

Mob Behavior and Medicine

Google Flu Trends , from Google.org ,  the philanthropic arm of Google, is a free online tool that may allow you to detect flu outbreaks in your area up to two weeks before official reports from the CDC .

Here's how it works: Millions of users enter health-related search terms in Google. During the flu season, many of these terms are flu-related. By tracking this aggregated search data, Google is able to estimate flu activity within a state earlier than the CDC's official reports appear. See the little video at Google.org for an illustration of this phenomenon.

The CDC's reports are based on information from health providers. Google searches usually occur before a person goes to a health professional, so in terms of reporting, Google's aggregated data cuts out the middle person, as it were. The graph below "shows five years of query-based flu estimates for the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, compared against influenza surveillance data provided by CDC's U.S. Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network. As you can see, estimates based on Google search queries about flu are very closely matched to a flu activity indicator used by CDC" (Google.org):

Google warns that past behavior does not necessarily predict future success in forecasting flu trends. Google Flu Trends is still experimental, but it has a great deal of promise as Google continues to tinker with it. It may, for instance, be a useful tool as epidemiologists attempt to identify and contain flu pandemics, such as the outbreak of 1918.

You can read more about Google Flu Trends at

• The New York Times 
• The Official Google.org Blog

The Music Video as History

MTV has posted its oeuvre of music videos on the Internet where they are free and legal to watch. As Very Short List says,

You’ll see spare-no-expense epics (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” just celebrated its 25th anniversary), bare-bones relics (e.g., Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), and early work by some of today’s most interesting directors (we’re especially fond of Michel Gondry’s videos for Björk). You can also revisit Unplugged and watch classic Video Music Awards performances by Madonna, TLC, and Kanye West.

We suggest you start with the list of Top Rated Videos and then work through Most Viewed. Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the top-rated video, and only yesterday MTV Europe named Rick Astley the Best Act Ever at the European Music Awards.

Rick Astley |MTV Music

Yes, this is the Rick Astley who inspired the viral internet phenomenon of Rickrolling. The meme is a bait 'n' switch where a link purportedly will lead viewers to some relevant information but actually takes them to Astley's video for "Never Gonna Give You Up."